A Key Step Toward Custom-Made Nanoscale Chemical Factories

Scientists have for the first time reengineered a building block of a geometric nanocompartment that occurs naturally in bacteria. The new design provides an entirely new functionality that greatly expands the potential for these compartments to serve as custom-made chemical factories. The work was led by Cheryl Kerfeld, who holds joint appointments with Berkeley Lab’s Molecular Biophysics and Integrated Bioimaging Division, UC Berkeley and the MSU-DOE Plant Research Laboratory at Michigan State University. Markus Sutter, a senior research associate in Kerfeld’s group at Berkeley Lab, collected the X-ray diffraction data used in this study in the Berkeley Center for Structural Biology at the Advanced Light Source. Read more at the Berkeley Lab News Center.